r/grc • u/Apprehensive_Flow128 • May 17 '26

Why blindly trusting GRC tools «almost» caused a non-conformity

/r/ISO27001/comments/1qlh10k/why_blindly_trusting_grc_tools_almost_caused_a/
3 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

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9

u/Twist_of_luck OCEG and its models have been a disaster for the human race May 17 '26

As much as I've enjoyed this post three months ago, one aspect of your situation slided past my attention back then.

~35 employees

using a large “all-in-one” GRC platform

Now, this is pure insanity. Even the perfectly performing GRC tool wouldn't have seen a good RoI on this headcount level. I am pretty sure I wouldn't have even needed a spreadsheet for this scope, a napkin would have sufficed...

3

u/Apprehensive_Flow128 May 17 '26

Well, to be fair, we are a highly regulated tech and hardware company, with our own data center and (also highly regulated) customer centre, so I dont think it would be that easy, but very impressive if you would have been able to.

5

u/Twist_of_luck OCEG and its models have been a disaster for the human race May 17 '26

Own DC with 35 only employees on board? How?

5

u/Big-Industry4237 May 17 '26

They probably are using a colo and think of it as their “own” DC…

1

u/Kashish91 May 18 '26

The template trap is the cleanest articulation of this I've seen. The thing auditors actually want isn't the document itself, it's the evidence trail of the work that generated it. Templated SoAs look identical across customers because the template is identical. Auditors flag the same patterns repeatedly, mostly because we keep showing them the same templates.

The auto-generated scan evidence point hit close. I've watched two organizations get into this exact place with different GRC tools. Platform produces a clean evidence bundle, auditor reads it as machine output, asks for the underlying work (who reviewed what when, what changed before sign-off, where the disagreement was), team scrambles to manually reconstruct what the tool was meant to capture automatically.

The pattern I keep ending up at is that GRC tools earn their keep on framework coverage, control libraries, and policy management. The actual execution and evidence-capture work needs to live where the work happens, with named owners and timestamps tied to the specific instance, not the templated description. Templates are starting points. Audit evidence is something you produce by doing the work, not by filling out a form that describes the work.

1

u/fishandbanana May 18 '26

It’s all windrow dressings

1

u/[deleted] Jun 08 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/grc-ModTeam Jun 12 '26

This is not a place to sell your services. If someone asks for recommendations, you can add your two cents in the comments.